Guest column | Art Casciato
(10/12/07 9:00am)
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After years of losses, Penn beats its rival
(01/19/01 10:00am)
Harvard 33, Penn 0. Bad news from Franklin Field? No, that score remains Penn 36, Harvard 35, and the Quakers are still Ivy League champions in football. But until recently there was a competition in which Harvard seemed always to shut out Penn, or very nearly so. Since the American Rhodes Scholarship program was instituted in 1904, Harvard has had 295 students named Rhodes scholars, far exceeding all other universities (Yale and Princeton follow, with 200 and 182 winners respectively). Penn students have won only 16 times overall. Harvard has boasted as many as 10 Rhodes in a single year -- a record -- and in the last seven years alone, Harvard students have been awarded 33 of these, the oldest and most prestigious international scholarships -- and Penn students not even one. Harvard 33, Penn 0. This year, of course, College senior Lipika Goyal changed all that. Her well-deserved Rhodes was the first for a Penn student since 1991. And for those who keep count, the tally for the new millennium? Penn 1, Harvard 0. Yes, this year the Crimson were the ones shut out -- for the first time in 70 years. As director of Penn's new Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships, I must admit that such fun with numbers is something more than a guilty pleasure, and there is of course some slippage in my little accounting. Competition for the Rhodes is hardly school-to-school, and we must always keep in mind that it is individuals who win these awards, not colleges or universities. Indeed, this was what Elliot Gerson, the American secretary of the Rhodes Trust, reminded Harvard students when several alarmed editorials in The Harvard Crimson bemoaned "the sad state of affairs" of not a single member of Harvard's Class of 2001 being named a Rhodes scholar. Gerson is right. And so is Paul Bohlmann, Harvard's director of fellowships, when he emphasizes that "Rhodes Scholarships aren't simply prizes that schools collect, but opportunities for students." That any university, even one as dominant as Harvard has been, does not "win" a Rhodes in a given year is no reason to panic or mourn or even gloat. Rather, we should admire, win or lose, all the outstanding students who had the courage to test themselves against the best of the best. At Penn this year, we had eight such students, and I'm proud of them all: Ari Alexander (our Marshall winner), Steve Davis, Goyal, Clif Haugen, Enrique Landa, Maria McClay, Jasmine Park and Cam Winton. Still, when it comes to Rhodes Scholarships, it is difficult not to measure yourself against Harvard's record. And so, despite (or perhaps because of ) Lipika's recent Rhodes success, one must ask: Why have so few Penn students won this award? The answer is no secret: Not enough Penn students apply. Simple as that. More numbers. At Harvard, 80 to 100 students apply to be Rhodes scholars each year, and of these about half go forward with the necessary university endorsement. At Cornell, which has won four Rhodes in the last seven years, 50 to 60 students apply annually and again about half are endorsed. Except for the happy outcome, this year at Penn was typical: seven of the eight students who applied were endorsed by the University; five of them received state interviews; three of these reached the regional finals; and one won. No doubt an efficiency of which to be proud, but relying on its lovely symmetry, 7-5-3-1, won't likely improve Penn's performance in winning the Rhodes. To achieve even Cornell's consistency, more of Penn's most talented students must apply. Why don't you apply? I can give you some reasons why you should. Don't apply for Penn's sake. Do it for yourself. Do it because of all your hard work, in and out of the classroom. Do it for the opportunity. Do it for the honor. Do it because there is no better "capstone experience" than a Rhodes (or a Marshall or a Fulbright or a Churchill or a Mitchell). Do it because, whatever the outcome, it is worth your effort. And CURF is here to help you.
GUEST COLUMNIST: Are too many midterms damaging our students?
(06/17/99 9:00am)
It's June, and if you ask me, nothing could be finer (or luckier) than being able to spend a sunny weekday morning sitting in a summer school class. And so, exercising nothing more than my staff privilege, I am taking Italian 110, or rather it takes me -- to places I've never been, with sounds and rhythms I've never really known. All I have to do is humble myself before students whose younger minds and ears are quicker, more receptive than my own. Small cost, I think, when every day I get to soak up words like the sun. Do you know that grattugiato means "grated"? Roll that across your tongue next time someone asks you to please, pass the cheese. What poetry! What fun! How could I have forgotten? I have spent the last year as the house dean of Harrison College House, watching over the daily lives of some 830 students. If done correctly, this is a very big job, but one of the rewards is the chance to talk with as many undergraduates as one could ever want or manage. Everyday I chat with them -- in the lobby, in my office, in the hallways, especially in the elevators. For the most part, Penn undergrads are a friendly and outgoing sort. At least for a while. But after only a few weeks of the semester have passed, a good number of these same cheerful students turn restive and distracted. To get on an elevator in the morning is too often to step into a silence as deep and icy as a winter's ocean. Such reticence, it is believed, is the only thing one might well expect in a structure as big and impersonal as a high rise. But I know better. It ain't the building that makes everyone so glum. The cause lies beyond its homely walls. And when I tease my young friends about not talking, they always raise their furtive eyes and grumble, "Midterms." And this whether it is three weeks into the semester or three weeks from its end. Am I missing something? Doesn't "a midterm" mean an examination given at the midpoint of the semester, or more or less then? But now, any test, no matter when it's given, can become "a midterm" and students have to get over or through a long line of them, sometimes even two or three in a single course. The tests are set like endless hurdles against the always receding horizon of the semester, from near the beginning to near the end. This, I'm afraid, is nonsense. What I'm asking you to consider instead is the emotional and psychological effect of these multiple midterms on the students themselves. How debilitating it must be to study as hard as you can for the midterm in a course only to have another "midterm" looming three or four weeks later. And if someone should complain that there is nothing more at stake here than the definition of a word or a bit of grouchiness on an elevator, I'd remind them that only last semester there was much justifiable worry over a "drinking problem" here at Penn. I don't know much about drinking problems but as a house dean I've had to deal with my share of residents who show up back at Harrison dead drunk. What worries me most about their drinking is that it is so terribly unhappy, even desperate. Some Penn students undergraduates, I'm convinced, have a taste for oblivion. This frightening situation is, as the theorists say, "overdetermined," but surely one of the many reasons for it is the student's desire to escape an academic environment in which the pressure is constantly ratcheted up, in which everything happens too often and too quickly. I don't think much would be lost if we slowed things down a bit around here. And perhaps something would be gained. Might as well call it enjoyment. What we need then, keeping in mind my figure of the icy ocean above, is a little shrinkage. So here's my truly modest proposal: How about limiting "midterms" to a two-week period, say, from the beginning of the seventh week of the semester to the end of the eighth? And, pleasekids, let's play nice: No more than one midterm per course. My simple plan, I realize, won't cure all our woes, but it might help to make everyday life at Penn a little more pleasant. Maybe more like summer school. Which reminds me: I must go outside and study. Che bel tempo! Grazie. Ciao!